The morning the news started circulating that Adalberto Mondesi woke up with a strained oblique, the Royals knew their season had changed before it began.
Mondesi has been the organization’s most discussed player for most of the last four seasons, and even if the injuries and plate discipline have chopped down some of his potential he remains a game-changing talent at a premium position and among the fastest players in his sport.
His injury hung over the Royals’ first 45 games like a rain cloud, to the point that some in the organization began to think like this:
If we can just be .500 when he gets back, we’ll be in good shape.
The path from there to here was rocky, but Mondesi makes his season debut for the team that at one point had the league’s best record, and then owned the league’s longest losing streak yet still welcomes him back just one game under .500.
This is a good moment to think about the Royals. They’re a hard group to define, and not just because of the wild swings of the first two months. They have obvious flaws — we’ll talk about the bullpen — but are far ahead of the pace set by most analysts and oddsmakers despite playing without their starting shortstop and with many others underperforming reasonable expectations.
You can look from one angle and see a group holding onto relevancy by a thinning thread. You can look from another angle and see a group with its head above water even through a storm, the rare team that can expect to get more talented as the season progresses.
This team is a baseball Rorschach Test, is the point, and we know that because there are coaches and officials around the team who aren’t sure what they have, either.
The good news is that help is coming, and not just with Mondesi. We’re all adults here, so we understand that the health of professional athletes is temporary, but Hunter Dozier should return from the injured list soon, as well.
Bobby Witt Jr. will almost certainly make his highly anticipated debut this summer. Edward Olivares is making a mockery of Triple-A East, though there are some questions about the quality of pitching there and the insight gained from seeing the same competition repeatedly.
The Royals ranked 11th in the American League in runs entering Tuesday’s game in Tampa, which isn’t good enough. Salvador Perez, Carlos Santana and Andrew Benintendi are the only hitters performing at reasonable expectations. Michael A. Taylor has moments. Whit Merrifield is performing below his own All-Star standard.
Dozier and Jorge Soler are among the team’s most important hitters, and each so far has delivered limp production that belies strong underlying metrics.
Soler’s average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage rank in the top 4 percent of big-leaguers. His barrel percentage is twice the league average, and his expected slugging percentage is above his career average. Dozier’s Statcast report is less flashy, but solid — he’s at or above his career averages in most measurements.
Both are among the league’s worst offensive performers so far, and this is all subjective, but the result can generally be described as one part bad luck and two parts lack of adjustments.
Those two players are not the same, Dozier and Soler, but one thing that’s obvious is that both have been in that head space of over-swinging and trying to pull everything. Pitchers don’t need to worry as much about giving up hard contact if they know that hard contact will be into a shift.
So, there is some reasonable optimism here. These are relatively routine problems and solutions. If and when Soler and Dozier adjust and perform closer to reasonable expectations, the Royals will be instantly, tangibly and significantly improved.
But they cannot fix the team’s biggest current need, because they are not relief pitchers.
Think back to the Royals’ 16-9 start. A lot of the problems we’ve talked about so far existed back then: Dozier and Soler were not producing, Mondesi was injured, and so on. But the bullpen worked. The analytics department, scouts, coaching staff and manager Mike Matheny collaborated on a plan that was communicated and consistently executed.
But even before the first regular season game club officials worried about the team’s pitching depth. The Royals’ modern approach to bullpen usage — relievers tied to certain spots of the opposition’s order more than a specific inning — simply does not work when they’re down to two reliable relievers.
The weakness is amplified when the starters leave early: Remember that May 16 loss to Chicago on a walk-off instant replay review? The Royals never wanted Wade Davis in that situation. The bullpen had been blown out in previous days. They lacked options.
Entering Tuesday’s games, only three teams in baseball had gotten fewer innings from their starting pitchers.
But that’s only part of the problem. Matheny has been able to rely on Josh Staumont and Scott Barlow in high-leverage spots, but the Royals’ lack of depth means they’re used often and sometimes unavailable. Danny Duffy could end up missing another few weeks, and the team is unsure about Jesse Hahn’s return.
The Royals can expect that depth is on the way. Jackson Kowar will be up soon. Ronald Bolanos has potential. Gabe Speier is throwing well for Omaha. Alec Marsh is coming along. The club recently traded cash to the Mariners for Domingo Tapia, part of a push to get more power arms in the bullpen.
But this club finds itself in a common modern baseball quagmire: It has plenty of guys with big-league velocity and movement, but little certainty about who’s actually ready to pitch in the big leagues.
Lynch is an exaggerated example of this point. He was MLB Pipeline’s No. 7 overall prospect, but three terrible starts exposed a delivery that may have been tipping pitches and an inconsistent ability to leverage his height and length by pitching down in the zone. He’ll be back, and probably soon, but the team had believed he was further along in his development.
Again: The Royals are not alone in dealing with some of this. A year plus a month of minor-league baseball being replaced by alternate sites has thrown prospect evaluations upside-down. Managing workloads against the need to face the best and most consistent competition possible is a precarious endeavor.
Let’s bottom-line this: The Royals’ overall record is better than it should be considering individual performances and injuries. Their problems are real, but tangible in-house solutions exist.
This is a race, then, between the Royals playing like they believe they can and the flaws dragging down their record. Mondesi’s return is a nice boost. More help is on the way. One way or another, we should soon know what this team is really about.
